What's New: The ABCs of marketing

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Improve your copywriting skills to increase sales:

• Always center your user, and remember that decision making is typically more emotional than logical. What connects users to your product?
• Pro tip for writing an e-book: Repurpose your existing content to get to market faster. Use your e-book as a lead magnet, and offer bonuses.
• $144K ARR in 5 months. Finding the right niche and pricing aggressively were the keys to Arjun Jain's rapid growth.

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The ABCs of Marketing 🧑‍🏫

by Leandro Genovesi

Here's how to increase your sales by improving your copywriting skills!

The basics

Let's start with the basics. Your writing should be:

• Clear: Read it out loud. Read it again and again. It must be easy to understand.

• Concise: Say what's necessary. Get rid of extra words.

• Aesthetic: Make it look nice. Keep an eye on emotional decision making.

• Brief: If it's not necessary, reduce your copy.

The ABCs of marketing

• User-centered content: Always center your users. The user is king; they must be your starting point. Don't build or write it if it isn't needed.

• Emotional decision making: Logic comes second. First, they buy with their heart, second with their brain, and third with their wallet.

• Show, don't tell: As an indie hacker, this is probably already second nature to you. Build in public; actions hold more weight than words.

If you do these things, you'll have 80% of the work done. But, as the 80/20 rule suggests, it's only 20% of total revenue!

The other 20%

Now, let's explore the other 20% of the work (the secrets):

• The art of drawing attention: The more disruptive something is, the more attention it will get. Disruptiveness depends on the context, always. Use it wisely, as it can do more harm than good to brand image if used poorly.

• Short copy, long copy: Shorter copy will be seen more, but longer copy will earn you more sales. High entry barriers mean more long-term clients.

• Emotional connection through character flaws: People connect more for the bad than for the good. Use that to your advantage. Every unfavorable aspect that interacts with the hero of your story works.

• Social influences: Here, take into account aspirational, belonging, and influential groups that interact with your user. Consider the herd mentality. Ideas must be socially accepted. Keep this in mind when crafting your copy.

Discuss this story.

In the News 📰

from the Growth Trends newsletter

🔎 X will enable advertisers to target premium subscribers only.

✨ Creating online display ads that work.

🚀 Applications due tomorrow for Launch Academy's impact accelerator. #ad

🛑 Stop obsessing over clickthrough rates.

📝 Facebook's 2024 advertising trends and tips.

📻 Radio shows surprising resilience, even in the rapidly changing media world.

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

Trend Alert: E-books 📚

from the Trends.vc newsletter

Problem

You need an easy way to learn from the lives of others and explore new worlds.

Solution

E-books offer an endless library that travels with you wherever you go.

Players

E-books:

• The Embedded Entrepreneur: How to build an audience-driven business.
• Landing Page Hot Tips: How to build effective landing pages.
• Deploy Empathy: Practical guide to interviewing customers.
• The Pathless Path: Imagine a better story for work and life.

E-book tools:

• Gumroad: Publish and sell e-books.
• Canva: Design the cover and layout.
• Hemingway: Check your writing complexity.
• Ulysses: Focused writing with proofreading and editing assistance.

E-book publishing services:

• StreetLib: Distribute e-books and audiobooks to worldwide book retailers.
• Ebook Launch: Edit, design, and format e-books.
• Pique Publishing: Writing, editing, and design services for e-books.

How to write e-books

• Repurpose your existing content to get to market faster.

• Write in public to boost your visibility.

• Base your book on interviews, taking the guesswork out of what to write. Darko wrote Zero to Users based on interviews with indie hackers.

How to grow e-books

• Use your e-book as a lead magnet to build an email list.

• Go on podcasts as a guest to reach new audiences.

• Work with reading clubs to share your book with book lovers.

How to monetize e-books

• Use crowdfunding to get early revenue, customers, and feedback.

• Sell your books on multiple platforms.

• Add value with bonus resources, like templates, checklists, and more.

Predictions

• Authors will use AI for help with writing, editing, and visuals.

• We’ll use AI to chat with books. We’ll be able to ask questions, get summaries, and more. PDF.ai lets you chat with any PDF document. iChatBook lets you ask questions to your e-books.

• Authors will build paid communities and offer their e-books for free to paid members.

Haters

“There isn't a lot of money to be made with e-books.”

Many authors write books because they want to tell a story, feel fulfilled, or build a legacy. If you want to make money, it's wise to choose another business model.

“Some of the e-books you shared have print versions.”

While this is true, a lot of strategies we shared work for both e-books and physical books.

“E-books are prone to piracy.”

This is true of all digital products.

Links

1. This E-book Made $500K: The thread for this report.
2. Writing a Report on E-books: The tweet behind this report.
3. How to Write a Good Story: Universal elements that all good stories need.
4. How to Make an E-book: How to write, publish, and market an e-book.

Related reports

• Micro-Education Businesses.
• Build in Public.
• Pre-sales.

Become a Trends Pro Member to get the full report on E-books, or get the next free Trends.vc report here.

Discuss this story, or subscribe to Trends.vc for more.

🔥 Landing Page Hot Tips

by Rob Hope

Strengthen your landing page with these design, development, and conversion tips!

Make it fast.

Not only does Google favor fast websites, but your visitors will be able to decipher your offering more quickly.

Speed through optimization means you’ve probably also tightened security and trimmed the fat.

Subscribe to Rob's One Page Love newsletter for his favorite UI, design, and development finds.

Arjun Jain Hit $144K ARR in Five Months 💰

by James Fleischmann

Arjun Jain started building pre.dev, a software planning and development platform, on August 1. By mid-November, he hit $100K ARR, and he's currently at $144K ARR.

Price aggressively

The key to our growth was aggressive pricing. Regarding pricing, it's definitely better to start too high than too low.

When we first built our product, we thought we would solely focus on founders who were looking to build their MVPs. While there is an abundance of such founders, the likelihood of them using us on a daily basis was low. They were great for getting us one-time build payments, but not the recurring revenue we wanted.

We then decided to reach out to agencies, changing our pitch to lean in on how we could drastically reduce their client onboarding time. This pitch hit well, and inspired us to quickly build out our enterprise interface.

We understood that the value we were offering could be directly measured by the number of hours we were saving our clients each week. We decided to work closely with clients who priced their own time aggressively, and were willing to pay money to save time.

We managed to target clients who publicly listed their minimum rate on Clutch, and found the customers who would benefit from it the most.

On finding the right niche

Work on something you know a lot about, or are happy to learn about. This is a huge boost to productivity, and the pace of innovation.

While it's important to niche down, be sure to also keep an open mind. We decided to reach out to some potential clients who we thought would find our product interesting, but weren't necessarily our ideal customer profile (ICP). This led to specific feature requests that ended up improving our product overall.

Marketing and sales

Our marketing has been purely through sales, outreach, and a few social media posts.

We wanted to get to a point where the product was totally self-serve, and any marketing would directly lead to subscriptions. We just reached that point this week, and will begin a marketing campaign soon.

Here's our outreach process: Once we had a list of agencies from Clutch, we had to find a way to get them on a call with us. The best way we found was to go on their website, fill out a contact form, and be very clear about what we were offering.

We found that the more transparent we were about our offering, the more quality leads we got. Once we completed the call, we sent up a follow-up email instructing them on how to sign up and try out the software. We then followed up with emails continuing the conversation, whether or not they'd signed up.

Build something you'll use internally, even if no one buys it. We lucked out with that!

Discuss this story.

The Tweetmaster's Pick 🐦

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Leandro Genovesi, Darko, Dru Riley, Rob Hope, and James Fleischmann for contributing posts. —Channing